This Week's Sermon: "Being Plentiful"

John 6:1-15

After this Jesus went across the Galilee Sea (that is, the Tiberias Sea). 2 A large crowd followed him, because they had seen the miraculous signs he had done among the sick. 3 Jesus went up a mountain and sat there with his disciples. 4 It was nearly time for Passover, the Jewish festival.

5 Jesus looked up and saw the large crowd coming toward him. He asked Philip, “Where will we buy food to feed these people?” 6 Jesus said this to test him, for he already knew what he was going to do. 7 Philip replied, “More than a half year’s salary worth of food wouldn’t be enough for each person to have even a little bit.” 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said, 9 “A youth here has five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that for a crowd like this?” 10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass there. They sat down, about five thousand of them. 11 Then Jesus took the bread. When he had given thanks, he distributed it to those who were sitting there. He did the same with the fish, each getting as much as they wanted.

12 When they had plenty to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather up the leftover pieces, so that nothing will be wasted.” 13 So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves that had been left over by those who had eaten. 14 When the people saw that he had done a miraculous sign, they said, “This is truly the prophet who is coming into the world.” 15 Jesus understood that they were about to come and force him to be their king, so he took refuge again, alone on a mountain. (Common English Bible)

“Three Years in Three Weeks: Christ’s Ministry, Our Calling,” Week Two

The ritual for me was always the same: flag down a cab in an interminable amount of time, climb awkwardly into the backseat of a Crown Victoria or Ford Escape that has clearly seen better days, tell the driver where I want to go, and then hang on for dear life as my life flashed before my eyes as the driver began that awful, awful experience that is riding in a car in Manhattan.

It was rarely a pleasant experience.  Oh, occasionally, it was.  There was an Ecuadorian driver who was wearing the jersey of Ecuador’s national soccer team after they had qualified to the World Cup, who lit up simply because I recognized the jersey and asked him about it.  And there was another driver who actually, you know, obeyed things like speed limits and stop signs.

But most of the time, it was a necessary evil, only better than taking a subway because of the absence of crowds and a quicker travel time.  But there was one driver’s cab I never had the joy of being able to travel in, and I use the word “joy” very much on purpose.

Here, I’ll let the folks at Today tell the story about this driver and his cab:

Mansoor Khalid made headlines two years ago when he stocked his taxi cab with a sweet surprise: handfuls of free candy to brighten the days of unsuspecting New Yorkers.

Bringing joy to others was a way for Khalid to heal following the death of his two year old son, who passed away in April of 2012 after a battle with heart disease…In addition to pleasing riders with a sweet tooth, the Candy Cab has been a source of joy and catharsis for the 38 year old Pakistani immigrant, who started driving a New York City taxi in 199.  After the death of his son Saad, Khalid searched for ways to bring happiness to other people’s lives as well as his own.  That’s when he remembered how the doctors and nurses at the hospital had responded to his gifts of coffee and snacks.

“I got so used to buying things for people, because when I would do something, they’d smile,” he said,  “I feel great when someone smiles.  You feel amazing.” (He) said his goal was to give stressed New Yorkers something to smile about, even after they’d reached their destination.  “You don’t have to choose one (candy),” he said.  “You can grab many.  My style is, when you get out, nobody goes home empty handed.  Fill up your pockets!  Take what you want.  Enjoy your life!”

But sweets aren’t the only reason his rides have been so special.  Last year, he decorated the cab with smiley faces and installed a karaoke sound system, enabling passengers to plug in their phones, grab a mic and sing along to their favorite songs while colorful lights flashed around them…

Since launching his Candy Cab, Khalid says he’s spent between $400 and $00 per month on candy, and pumped an additional $4,000 into the karaoke and lightning upgrades.

Can you imagine that?  Spending the equivalent of at least $4,800 per year just on candy, none of it for yourself?  And that amount for karaoke system?  All to bring some joy to peoples’ rushed and harried lives?  I highly doubt any of us would do something like that, but I also highly doubt that any of us would turn down benefitting from it.  I, and probably all of us, would be more than happy to take a ride in Khalid’s Candy Cab.

But that chance might otherwise be gone.  The reason Khalid’s name is in the news is because the Candy Cab is currently defunct: the cab itself has puttered out after over 210,000 miles, and now Khalid is trying to raise the funds to obtain a new cab.  Which, like everything else except oxygen, does not come cheap in New York City.

But this is still someone who has been as plentiful as possible with what joy in life can be had after the loss of an infant child, to the point that he would spend this money on other people rather than a new cab for himself until he absolutely had to.  He gave out of his abundance until he couldn’t give anymore.  And that is, in a sentence, what Jesus does with the five loaves and two fish in the feeding of the five thousand.  The candy might have tasted better, but in this story, Jesus still gives, and gives, and gives, simply because He can.  And so should we.

This is a new sermon series for the kickoff of a new “church year,” which conveniently runs identically with the school year (we’ll forget for a moment that traditionally, the new church year began with the Christmas season, aka Advent, but that’s another kettle of fish).  It also coincides with the start of year four of all y’all putting up with me, and I have to say, looking back on our first three years together, there is a lot for us to be proud of and to hang our proverbial hats on: we’ve seen the marriages of half a dozen couples involved in the church, we’ve had 9 (soon 10!) baptisms, and the amount of mission work that we’ve done in the community, measuring in the tens of thousands of dollars in value, which, when you consider our still small size, speaks volumes to this congregation’s commitment to fulfilling Christ’s fundamental command to care for the marginalized among us.

But there is still so much for us to do, and I haven’t done an explicitly vision casting sermon series for our community since the “Time to be Church” series way, way back in the beginning of 2013, and a lot has changed for us since then.  So, this series is meant to represent, in three installments, what I am envisioning for our next three years together, and the series’ structure comes from how John’s Gospel describes the beginning of each of the three years of Jesus’ own ministry, and we began last week in Year One with a famous story that the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, place towards the end of Jesus’ ministry, but one that John curiously puts at the very beginning: the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem.  This week, we get to Year Two, which is marked by another well known story that is in all four Gospels: the feeding of the five thousand.

And as with the cleansing of the temple, John takes the story of the feeding of the five thousand and places it in a very different context than Matthew, Mark or Luke.  The latter three place the temple cleansing at the very end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, whereas John places it at the very beginning, and similarly, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all place the feeding of the five thousand either immediately after or very soon after the beheading of John the Baptist. 

John (to avoid confusion, we’re talking about the evangelist John who wrote the Gospel, who is not the same John as John the Baptist…John being a common name even back then, who knew?) doesn’t even include the beheading of the Baptist in his Gospel, and as such, has to have a different frame of reference for the timing of this unanimously testified-to miracle by default.  And that context is: nearly at the start of the next Passover, marking Year Two of Jesus’ three-year ministry.

John does, however, share a different characteristic with one of the Gospels, it is in fact extremely relevant to the fact that it is almost the Passover: Jesus is situated on a mountain, just as He is for Matthew’s accounting of the Sermon on the Mount (guess where that took place?).  And most commentators believe that Matthew’s detail of Jesus being on a mountain while interpreting the law was no coincidence, as it was meant to mirror Moses at Mount Sinai receiving the law for the very first time.

Moses, of course, is the key figure in the story of the Passover: he is the one who has led the Israelites to this point where the Tenth Plague is about to happen which will at long last liberate the Israelites from enslavement under the Egyptians.  And then the Passover happens.

Jesus, by once again being on a mountain, invokes the memory of Moses, and by breaking bread and sharing it with everyone there with Him, He invokes the Passover meal of unleavened bread that all of the Israelites shared with their families as their last meal together in Egypt before the exodus out.

And just as following Moses liberated the Israelites from slavery, so too does following Jesus liberate us from evil.

John doubles down on this interpretation of the meaning of the feeding of the five thousand by being the only one of the four gospel writers to use the Greek term “eucharisteo,” from which we get the English term “Eucharist,” and which literally means, “to give thanks.”  Jesus gives thanks for not only what meager little we have brought to His feed, but He also gives thanks for what is about to happen as well: what He knows is about to happen, the miracle of the hunger of five thousand souls being sated.  He gives thanks for the liberation from hunger as well as the liberation from evil.

And that is all part of a mentality of being plentiful as a church: we are called to give thanks not only for what has been done for us, donated to us, given to us in the past, we are to also give thanks for what we are to receive in the future as well.  It is a rule of thumb that serves us well as individuals too, and as families, but as a church that focus on gratitude for the future is absolutely paramount, because without it, what we often substitute in its place is…well, fear.

Think about it.  How many times have you heard someone say about the (universal, big C) Church, “Well, I don’t know about the future of the church, everyone in this new generation seems to have given up on the church,” or, “We really aren’t interested in trying anything new to bring new disciples in or to engage the Gospel in new ways?”  How much of that sentiment do you think is about giving thanks for the future?  How much of that sentiment do you think needs to be replaced by giving thanks for what the future might hold for the body of Christ?

Think again about Khalid, the Candy Cab driver.  I cannot begin to imagine wanting to be thankful for anything in the future if the present has just taken away my child.  I cannot even begin to think about what I might still have left to give away to the world when this world has already taken so much from me.  But you know what?  That isn’t how Jesus went about His own ministry, even though He knew darn well that it would, in the end, demand the ultimate sacrifice from Him as well in the form of His own earthly life.

But Jesus sought to be plentiful regardless.  So too, then, should we.  May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 

September 14, 2014

(original photo credit: ligonier.org.  If you feel so moved to aid Mansoor Khalid's quest to resurrect the Candy Cab, the Today link contains a link to his Gofundme campaign.)

9/11 In Memoriam: Sky of Blackness and Sorrow, Sky of Fullness and Blessed Life

Can't see nothin' in front of me 
Can't see nothin' coming up behind 
I make my way through this darkness 
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me 

Lost track of how far I've gone 
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed 
On my back's a sixty pound stone 
On my shoulder a half mile line 

Come on up for the rising 
Come on up, lay your hands in mine 
Come on up for the rising 
Come on up for the rising tonight 

Left the house this morning 
Bells ringing filled the air 
I was wearin' the cross of my calling 
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here 

Come on up for the rising 
Come on up, lay your hands in mine 
Come on up for the rising 
Come on up for the rising tonight

Spirits above and behind me 
Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright 
May their precious blood forever bind me 
Lord as I stand before your fiery light

I see you Mary in the garden 
In the garden of a thousand sighs 
There's holy pictures of our children 
Dancin' in a sky filled with light 

May I feel your arms around me 
May I feel your blood mix with mine 
A dream of life comes to me 
Like a catfish dancin' on the end of the line 

Sky of blackness and sorrow (a dream of life) 
Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life) 
Sky of glory and sadness (a dream of life) 
Sky of mercy, sky of fear (a dream of life) 
Sky of memory and shadow (a dream of life) 
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight 
Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life) 
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life (a dream of life) 

Come on up for the rising 
Come on up, lay your hands in mine 
Come on up for the rising 
Come on up for the rising tonight

-Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising," July 16, 2002


In memory of the 2,977 souls whose lives were taken by terrorism on September 11, 2001, and in profound gratitude to the first responders, medical personnel, and Good Samaritans who saved the lives of many more that day.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

(photo credit: greatbuildings.com)

The Grammy Awards performance of The Rising, introduced by the late, missed Robin Williams:

This Week's Sermon: "Being Prophetic"

John 2:13-22

13  It was nearly time for the Jewish Passover, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 He found in the temple those who were selling cattle, sheep, and doves, as well as those involved in exchanging currency sitting there. 15 He made a whip from ropes and chased them all out of the temple, including the cattle and the sheep. He scattered the coins and overturned the tables of those who exchanged currency. 16 He said to the dove sellers, “Get these things out of here! Don’t make my Father’s house a place of business.” 17 His disciples remembered that it is written, Passion for your house consumes me. 

18 Then the Jewish leaders asked him, “By what authority are you doing these things? What miraculous sign will you show us?” 19 Jesus answered, “Destroy this temple and in three days I’ll raise it up.” 20 The Jewish leaders replied, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and you will raise it up in three days?” 21 But the temple Jesus was talking about was his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered what he had said, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. (Common English Bible)

“Three Years in Three Weeks: Christ’s Ministry, Our Calling,” Week One

The number of different fees, when listed off one right after the other, would make just about anyone’s (who wasn’t, say, an accountant) mind spin:

$10 per month.

99 cents per transaction.

$5 per deposit of funds.

$3 to create a money order, and $5 from the utilities company to accept a money order as payment (which is pretty funny—in the bad way—when you consider that money orders are prepaid by definition, and as such are basically negotiable as cash).

And all of this was due to the fact that because Jennifer’s bank had closed her checking account, so he had to rely a prepaid debit card for making all of her financial transactions.  If you have ever bought a prepaid gift debit card at the supermarket or at Target or wherever, you probably noticed the fine print on the front of the package that says, “+ $4.95 activation fee” or somesuch, well, for Jennifer, it was like having to pay that activation fee every day: she estimates that having nothing but a debit card cost her ~$250 per month before she was able to get a new account with a new bank.

The irony—the terrible, incredible, destructive irony—of all of this is that of course this woman could not afford that $250 per month, but she had to because she was so poor she could no longer function within our modern economy.  It kept her poor.  And that is the way we have intended it: one nonprofit CEO estimates that up to 10 percent of an impoverished person’s income goes to “financial services” if they do not have a bank account.

10 percent of their income.  That’s a tithe.  Only, instead of being able to tithe to God with dignity, our working poor today are forced to tithe to the predators who prey on their financial vulnerability: the peddlers and pushers of those heavily marked up debit cards, plus the check cashers and the I’m-amazed-its-not-butter (if by ‘not butter’ you meant, ‘still legal’) payday loan industry.

And we could lump all of those financial predators up into one gigantic group of awfulness, label them the moneychangers and the moneylenders of the Jerusalem temple that Jesus cleanses here in John 2, and we would not be too far off from the truth one bit.

This is a new sermon series for the kickoff of a new “church year,” which conveniently runs identically with the school year (we’ll forget for a moment that traditionally, the new church year began with the Christmas season, aka Advent, but that’s another kettle of fish).  It also coincides with the start of year four of all y’all putting up with me, and I have to say, looking back on our first three years together, there is a lot for us to be proud of and to hang our proverbial hats on: we’ve seen the marriages of half a dozen couples involved in the church, we’ve had 9 baptisms, and the amount of mission work that we’ve done in the community, measuring in the tens of thousands of dollars in value, which, when you consider our still small size, speaks volumes to this congregation’s commitment to fulfilling Christ’s fundamental command to care for the marginalized among us.

But there is still so much for us to do, and I haven’t done an explicitly vision casting sermon series for our community since the “Time to be Church” series way, way back in the beginning of 2013, and a lot has changed for us since then.  So, this series is meant to represent, in three installments, what I am envisioning for our next three years together, and the series’ structure comes from how John’s Gospel describes the beginning of each of the three years of Jesus’ own ministry, and we begin in Year One with a famous story that the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, place towards the end of Jesus’ ministry, but one that John curiously puts at the very beginning: the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem.

And it is curious for several reasons, not the least of which is because the other three stooges all place this event more towards the end rather than the beginning, but also because John himself says that the disciples who witnessed this epic buttkicking did not grasp the full meaning of what had happened here until after Jesus had died and risen again: that was, after all, what He meant when He had said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

Now, as is so very often the case in John’s Gospel, the hearers of Jesus’ words take said words far too literally (which should actually stand as a Biblical warning to us to not take Scripture exclusively literally either, but that is, yet again, another can of tuna), and they explode with righteous indignation.  “Well, it took 46 years for this temple to be constructed!”  (Seriously, who the heck was their general contractor, and why wasn’t he sacked after, like, year thirty-seven?)

But what is truly ironic about what Jesus’ respondents are saying is that they are, in fact, betraying a dimension of the true depth and severity of their crime: they are taking something that took literally generations to build, that their ancestors slaved decades over, and turning it into their own personal get-rich-quick scheme.  It isn’t like they are working from home, or renting space in some generic strip mall on the exurbs, no, they are setting up shop right where ancient Jewish theology says God Himself lived, basically right on God’s front porch.

And what they are doing on God’s front porch is nothing short of abominable.  Now, this part takes a bit more explanation to unpack, so bear with me.  At this point in time, temple Judaism still demanded animal sacrifices from its constituents as a matter of religious worship, even though Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Micah had railed vehemently against the practice.  So, upon every Passover, families would come in to Jerusalem to sacrifice an animal just like the Israelites under Moses sacrificed their lambs and used the lambs’ blood to mark the lintel and posts of their doorways, thus allowing the Angel of Death to “pass over” their houses and slay only the Egyptian firstborns instead (why the Angel of Death couldn’t have just checked IDs at the door is beyond me, it’s God’s agent after all and thus presumably smarter than, say, your average Doberman who is in fact very good at differentiating between “bloody and “not bloody”).

But what if a family didn’t have an animal to sacrifice, you might ask.  Therein lies the rub.  Just like any good economy, when a demand is noticed, supply springs to meet it.  So peddlers of animals—cattle, sheep, doves, even pigeons for the truly destitute families who couldn’t afford anything nicer—set up shop in the temple courtyards.  And because temple security could control who could operate there and who could not, they were able to essentially create a monopoly for themselves and gouge their customers in the name of religious piety.  But that’s only the first part of the scam.

See, Israelite law banned the use of the Roman currency, the denarius, in the temple, in part because it bore the image of Caesar who was treated posthumously as a god, and thus was a graven image to a pagan deity that violated the first and second of the Ten Commandments.  So, there was an artificial demand for moneychangers.  And, like the animal merchants, the moneychangers were able to set up monopolies for themselves and charge whatever commission they could get away with.

And keep in mind, both of these practices most affected those who could not afford to either raise a sacrificial animal themselves, or bring it with them to Jerusalem, or both.  It hurt the poorest of the pilgrims, whose religious devotion to God was exploited by the merchants and the moneychangers. 

This is what Jesus was violently condemning when He bounced them out of the Temple, and it is sinfulness like this that we too are called to condemn when we see it happening in our world: exploitation of the least powerful, oppression of the most marginalized, persecution of the most vulnerable.  It is called being prophetic, because that is what so many of the Old Testament prophets preached about themselves.  Jesus carried on that tradition, and we are called to carry it on as well in His stead until His return.

Believe me, it exists in all sorts of forms against people who are impoverished today, and we would otherwise never know.  You do not have to dress in rags or look like Oliver Twist to be the person whom others are making a killing off of simply because you are too poor for a bank account, but we act like you have to in order to be fully deserving of our prayers, our sympathy, and our aid.

And that sort of mentality ultimately runs counter to the entire mission of being a Christian.  Christ did not hand out litmus tests to the poor and the lepers, to the prostitutes and the tax collectors, no, He welcomed them regardless, told them that their faith had saved them, and charged them to back out into the world and live for Him.  He reserved His moral outrage for those whom deserved it.

But we don’t do that.  Instead of protesting the treatment of the poor by today’s financial institutions and payday lenders, we protest the existence of contraception.  Instead of vigorously protesting the treatment of the persecuted Christians in Iraq under ISIS, or in North Korea under Kim Jong Un, we more vigorously protest that we ourselves are persecuted because we aren’t allowed by law to tell you who to vote for in church.  We have lost sight of what Christ fought for.

It isn’t just that we have, in Paul’s words, all fallen short of the glory of God, it is that we have fallen short of the mission of Christ itself.  And so the first prong of our path going forward as a church is for us to continue working on being prophetic: on being able to speak out with a moral voice for the people of our time and against the evils of our time.  Because there are so many such evils right here at home that we are working against and continue to be prophetic towards, including the prepaid card and payday loan evils I have been talking about, and whose ills I know have affected a number of you directly, but that many of us are also completely unaware of.  As my own mom said when I posted an excerpt from this very sermon to Facebook, “there’s a parallel universe out there most middle class Americans never see, even though it’s just down the street and around the corner.”

Let us go forth, then, and like Jesus, be a prophetic church against that parallel universe of sin, and seek to replace it with another universe of unending divine love.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 
September 7, 2014

(original photo credit: ligonier.org) 

On Hijacking a Peoples' History for Your Own Bigotry

(I've got several posts down the pipeline, including a couple that I have ended up sitting on for a couple of weeks now, but this is something that simply could not, and cannot, wait.  Armenians and Christians alike need to be able to say "Not in my name" to bigotry and Islamophobia. -E.A.)

This is personal.

It is personal because I went to both college and seminary with Muslim classmates.  They taught me much about living with faith (albeit not a faith I identify with) and about being proud of that faith and who it has made me.

I keep a Qur'an on my shelf in my office.  I don't consider it the word of God, but its stories about Jesus are really quite profound and amazing, and if I'm going to engage in any discussion with or about Muslims, I owe it to God and to everybody involved to be informed about what their sacred texts actually do and do not say.

But it is also personal because the history of my ancestors who lived and died at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War in what was the first of several genocides throughout the 20th century...that history is precisely that: mine.

It is not yours.  And I don't care if that sounds selfish.  That history of my family is mine, and it belongs to me and my family.

And when you, or anyone, use it to justify your own violent bigotry against literally one and a half billion people, that's a problem.

It's a problem because you are taking one of the worst things humanity has ever done to one another, and the worst thing ever done to my own people, and using it to advocate doing the exact same thing to more people.

It's a problem because that means you do not have any grasp at all of what the tragedy of the Armenian Holocaust actually means to its victims...to us Armenians and their progeny.  You are using this terrible thing done against us for your own twisted ends, not for our own advocacy and healing.

And those twisted ends, when they include the advocacy of genocide as well, are an offense to us.  They are an offense to the Christian faith you purport to share with me.  They are an offense to humanity.

And they are an offense to God.  Of this I am certain.

What I am talking about--a post entitled "Why I Absolutely Am Islamaphobic" (sic) written by one Gary Cass and posted on the Charisma News website--was taken down after a concerted #takedownthatpost Twitter campaign.  But the comments section to that post is still very much live, and as of this writing, Charisma News has neither commented or apologized for running the piece in the first place.

That is also a problem.  It implies you don't get why the post was so fundamentally, morally wrong.

Now, even though the post itself is down off the net, I have the post still in its browser window on my old computer, and these are just a few of the quotes found therein, verbatim (all grammatical, factual, and syntax errors, of which there are many, are faithfully replicated here in the interest of putting the fullest possible dimension of this idiocy on display):

"Fourteen years of history, both ancient and modern (i.e. the 1 to 1.5 million dead Armenians at the hands of the Muslim Turks in 1915) tell us that Muslims are deadly serious about their infernal goals."

"Here's three possible solutions, but really there's only one.  1) Conversion. 2) D.A.M.N. (Deport All Muslims Now) 3. Violence."

"Wouldn't it be wonderful to see Muslims turn from Satan (Allah) to Christ?  But, I agree with Phil Robertson: This is not biblically doable."

"Muslims in America are procreating at twice the rate of other groups.  So either we force them all to get sterilized, or we wait for the "Army of Islam" to arise in our midst and do what Muslims always do, resort to violence."

"The only thing that is biblical and that 1,400 years of history has shown to work is overwhelming Christian just war and overwhelming self defense."

"ISIS has done us all a favor.   The true face of Islam is on full display even as Muhammad burns in hell."

"First trust in God, then obtain a gun(s), learn to shoot, teach your kids the Christian doctrines of just war and self defense, create small cells of family and friends that you can rely on if some thing catastrophic happens and civil society suddenly melts down." 

Okay, that's enough.  I will say this: if Christians militantly rise up against Muslims the way that the most extreme fringe of Islam has risen up against, well, pretty much everyone, then that would be the "civil society melting down" part.  We would be guilty of that ourselves.

Which is why I say, as vehemently and unkindly as possible to Gary Cass and his like minded ilk who are a-okay with hijacking my history to support their own barbaric agenda: BUGGER THE HELL OFF.  YOU SICKEN ME.  YOU SICKEN CHRIST.  AND YOU SICKEN GOD.

God may not make mistakes, but you sure as hell are trying to make them in His name.  Stop.  For the love of all that is good, right, moral, holy, and sacred about God's work, stop and repent.

And to my fellow Christians, a word of warning: if you ever take mainstream Islam to task because you want them to (rightfully) condemn the acts of Islamic extremists like ISIS and al-Qaeda (which, by the way, they do unequivocally condemn), then it is equally incumbent upon you to likewise condemn the extremists of our own religion, the advocates of cleansing and, dare I say it, genocide of an entire religion.

Otherwise, we are naught but hypocrites.  And Christ had some pretty strong words for the hypocrites amongst His presence.

And Charisma News, for God's sake, apologize already for peddling that piece of pure hate speech.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

What *really* Makes a Person a Sodomite: A Response to Robby Gallaty

"Sodomite" is a term that I heard as a kid, but that makes me cringe as an adult.  Sodomy is, by and large, one of those terms that really should be relegated to the dustbin of history, not just because of how outdated and offensive it has become (like, say, the term "Negro"), but also because of how utterly inaccurate it really is.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah begins in Genesis 14, but all anyone generally tends to remember about it begins in Genesis 18, when God sends three men (or, angels disguised as men) to Sodom.  There, they are welcomed by Abraham's nephew Lot, and then, in Genesis 19, come nightfall, a group of men from Sodom surrounded Lot's house and demanded that Lot give them the men so that they may "know" them (a Biblical euphemism for sex).

Let's unpack this circumstance for a moment.  Now, I've read commentators that argue that what is depicted here is an attempt at rape (or gang rape) because, well, sex is essentially being demanded by the men of Sodom.  But it's even more than rape.  It's the demand to turn the men (angels) over to the Sodom citizens: this isn't only gang rape, this is an attempt at human trafficking as well.

Of all the gay and lesbian people whose friendship I have had the honor of, not one of them treats their sexuality in the same way as the sex slavers whom so many Christian churches today rightly fight against.  Believe it or not, they seek the same sort of loving relationships that we do, based on trust, affection, and mutual respect.

In other words, this isn't just apples and oranges, this is apples and, I dunno, roof shingles.  The two aren't even remotely related.

And let's be clear here: there are no heroes in this story of Sodom.  Lot, in response to the men of Sodom, offers to give them his two daughters who are virgins for them to do with "whatever they wish." (CEB translation)  He is willing to traffick his own family members (and to be a knowing accomplice in their subsequent gang rape).  His behavior in this story is utterly cowardly and abhorrent.

We're left, then, with two options: that trafficking your own daughters and enabling their rapists is the Biblical standard for sexuality, or it isn't.  If the former is true, then why on earth should we even follow the precepts of such a clearly barbaric book?  If it is the latter, well...it turns out there is evidence for that.

Fast forward to the book of the prophet Ezekiel.  For context, his sixteenth chapter is devoted to prophesying against Jerusalem for its "detestable practices" (or "abominations," depending on your translation).  Starting in verse 48, Ezekiel has this to say:

48 As surely as I live, says the Lord God, not even your sister Sodom and her daughters did what you and your daughters have done! 49 This is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were proud, had plenty to eat, and enjoyed peace and prosperity; but she didn’t help the poor and the needy. 50 They became haughty and did detestable things in front of me, and I turned away from them as soon as I saw it.

This is Sodom's first sin: being proud and prosperous and without want and not helping the poor and needy.  From that sin comes (they 'became') the second: haughtiness and detestable things, which is presumably a reference to the trafficking and gang rape, but there's no way to say that conclusively, because a number of things in the OT are referred to specifically as "detestable" or "abominations."

The "became" word in the middle there is the clutch part: one led to another.  Sodom's lack of empathy for the poor and needy, even in the midst of their own prosperity, enabled such a complete disregard for humanity that they tried to kidnap and rape a trio of angels in Genesis 19.

And what does all of that have to do with homosexuality, or same sex orientation?  Not a damn thing.

But we pretend that it does.  All the time.

I follow a lot of pastors on Twitter, including many who I disagree with pretty profoundly on different things, simply because I don't like living in an echo chamber and I want to see what other churches outside of my regular stomping grounds are saying.  This past Sunday, one of those pastors whom I follow (and who also follows me), Robby Gallaty of Brainerd Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, decided to preach a fifty minute sermon on what he called "God's Standard for Sexuality."

Here are a couple of verbatim quotes:

"It doesn't take a degree to realize God's stance in the Old Testament on homosexual activity."

By that same token, if it doesn't take a degree to realize God's stance in the OT on rape and sex trafficking, that means that God is okay with it (see also Deuteronomy 22:28 and 29, where a man can force himself onto an unmarried woman and then pay her father fifty shekels and she automatically becomes his wife).

Why would we follow such a terrible and, dare I say it, detestable and abominable God?

The short answer is that we shouldn't.

The longer answer is that, of course, we don't have to. God is not terrible or detestable.  God is amazing, awe inspiring, and a source of love and mercy and grace far beyond yours or my understanding.  And that is what Gallaty gets at: we are all changed by the grace of God.

"It's (homosexuality) not how He created us...homosexuality is a choice."

Being gay or lesbian isn't something you should change.  Or try to.  I even said this in my own sermon on Sunday: we Christians have devoted far too much (which is to say, any at all) time and resources into so called "reparative therapy" with no scientific or medical merit simply because we thought we could magically change gay people into straight people like Minerva McGonagall turning her desk into a pig.

Not only that, but we ignore the truth that is in Psalm 139, a psalm many of us like to quote for our pro life views: that God knitted us in our mother's womb.  And if you came out of that womb orientated towards being attracted to people of  your gender, well, God did in fact create you that way.

But I have a simpler question for Robby: if sexuality really is a choice (as opposed to God creating us a particular way), when did you choose to be straight?  And how was it coming out to your friends and family with your decision to be straight?

"Homosexuality is an attack on family and marriage...Homosexuality is the most lethal attack we have against the family."

Good gravy.  Robby, there are so many bigger attacks on marriage you can spend fifty minutes preaching on.  Preach on absentee parents.  Preach on domestic violence.  Preach on divorce.  Heck, preach on the love of money, since finances are the root of some of the most pervasive and recurring marital disputes.  ALL of those are way more lethal than homosexuality.  In fact, especially in the case of domestic violence, it is literally lethal.  People die from this sin, to the staggering tune of 1,300 souls per year.

But by all means, please, tell me about how gay people are a bigger attack on families than violent abuse.  Even though the only ways gay people die from being gay are the direct results of other people: being beaten to death by homophobes, being kicked out of their parents' home and made homeless, or being driven to suicide at rates far higher than the national average.

So don't preach about gay people as an attack on something.  My friends and colleagues who are gay, they aren't out to ruin your marriage or your family.  They just want to have one of their own.

Why am I going off so strongly on all of this, though?  Because I am so freaking tired of seeing my colleagues get away with peddling this sort of snake oil that does nothing for the belief of their followers but that does tremendous harm to the actual people behind the sexual orientation they are railing against.

I am so saddened by my  from gay and lesbian friends whom I would LOVE to have a pastoral relationship with saying to me, "I can't ever set foot in a church again, I don't feel welcome anymore."

I am so utterly exhausted from having to do damage control for a Christianity that goes so far out of its way sometimes to make itself difficult to love.

And Robby Gallaty is not an isolated pastor by any means.  There are so many of my colleagues out there who are putting their legalism ahead of their relationships and putting their love for a few out of context Biblical verses ahead of their love for God's children.

And their combined voice is what is turning our great church into the ultimate Sodomite: someone (or something) that goes out of its way to gang up on strangers to make them feel completely unsafe there.

Which is the exact opposite of what we should be about: after all, a 'sanctuary' in a church literally means a 'safe space.'  And if we cannot be that safe space for gay and lesbian children of God who want nothing more than to live lives of faith in their Creator and love for one another, then we need to stop calling this thing we do the body of Christ.

Being gay doesn't make you a person of Sodom.  Rejecting out of hand someone who is gay, though, I'm afraid absolutely does.

Yours in Christ,
Eric